how to write computer code the most marketable

#HOW TO WRITE COMPUTER CODE THE MOST MARKETABLE SOFTWARE#

Here’s what’s involved: competitors are given five to 10 problems expressed in natural language and allowed three hours to write programs to creatively solve as many problems as possible. AlphaCode is the first ever AI system capable of competing with humans in this context. Although these challenges are not typical of the average day-to-day workload of programmers, the ability to solve the problems it sets in a creative manner is a good indicator of programming ability. In classic DeepMind style, the company decided to see how its system would perform on 10 challenges on Codeforces, a platform that hosts worldwide competitive programming contests. Overall, AlphaCode came out at the level of the median competitor performing Codeforces challenges Recently, it announced that it had developed AlphaCode, a new programming engine potentially capable of outperforming many human developers. DeepMind is famous for developing the Go-playing world champion AlphaGo and AlphaFold, the machine-learning system that seems better at predicting protein structures than any human.

No real inference or reasoning is required.Īt this point, DeepMind, the London-based AI company, became interested in the problem.

#HOW TO WRITE COMPUTER CODE THE MOST MARKETABLE SOFTWARE#

All the software has to do is to search through the huge repository of computer code that exists in its database and find a match that will do the job.

Apps are small programs and the kinds of tasks Codex can do are ones that can be described succinctly in ordinary language. This was impressive, quirky and perhaps useful in some contexts, but really it was just picking low-hanging fruit. In no time at all, there were tech startups such as SourceAI aimed at harnessing this new programming tool. So you could ask the program to write code to do a simple task – “make a snowstorm on a black background”, for example – and it would write and run the necessary code in Javascript. Anyone who thinks programming is easy has never done it.Īll of which goes to explain why I sat up when, last year, someone realised that Codex, an offspring of GPT-3, a large neural network trained on vast troves of text gathered from the web that could generate plausible English text, could write apps, ie, short computer programs including buttons, text input fields and colours, by remixing snippets of code it had been fed. And what I took away from the experience was a lifelong respect for programmers who can write elegant, efficient code. But it did the job and in that sense was, in the laconic phrase sometimes used by the great computer scientist Roger Needham, “good enough for government work”. The software I wrote was clumsy and inefficient and more talented programmers would look at it and roll their eyes, much as Rory McIlroy might do if required to play a round with an 18-handicap golfer. These pieces of utilitarian software were written in languages now regarded as the programming equivalent of Latin – Fortran, Algol and Pascal – and what I learned from the experience was that I was not a born hacker. I studied engineering at university and, like most of my contemporaries, found that I sometimes needed to write computer programs to do certain kinds of calculations.

How to write computer code the most marketable